The moment

She took the last of her coffee in one big gulp and sighed. It felt like she had been sitting there for hours, achieving nothing. Her brain would just not cooperate and she had an assignment due next week. It might seem like a long time, but she hadn’t even started yet. Her parents had spent all their savings for her to go to college, so she couldn’t afford to mess this up. On one hand she felt a strong obligation towards her parents. On the other hand, she felt like the course had been a big mistake. Maybe a little break would help with her motivation. She picked up her phone and mindlessly started scrolling through all of her social media apps. If her assignment had been to spend x number of hours on the phone, she would have aced it. Another sigh.

Suddenly she was woken from her phone coma by a murmur of voices. She looked up to see a group of students gathered around something she could not see. Curious, she got up and started towards the assembly.

‘No way.That’s insane’ one person said.

‘See you, suckers. Imma be rich!’ another laughed triumphantly.

She made her way through the crowd and finally saw what the whole fuss was about. Hanging on the library wall she saw a poster depicting a leprechaun. She quickly realized that it was the announcement of this year's St. Patrick's day scavenger hunt. She was just about to go back to her table when she heard another person say: ‘Holy shit! 20.000?’. She turned back and this time she actually read the poster.

Top o’ the mornin’ to ya!

It is time to put aside your phone and participate in the annual St. Patrick's day scavenger hunt.

Follow the clues to the end of the rainbow and a pot of gold will be waiting for you.

This year the prize will be $20.000 so hurry up and see if you are the one with the luck of the Irish.

“May your blessings outnumber the shamrocks that grow. And may trouble avoid you wherever you go”

She stood there, gaping at the wall. $20.000? In the previous years the prize had been movie tickets, gift cards to local businesses and random stuff a student might need. It seemed too good to be true, but she immediately knew she had to try nonetheless. Maybe she would be able to pay back some of the money she felt like she owed her parents. But where to start? The poster said nothing about where the scavenger hunt took place or even a riddle for them to solve. She rubbed her eyes and took a deep breath. People were still crowded around the posters, but as she stood there she saw someone silently leave the crowd and sneak out. She looked back to the poster. There had to be a clue there so she reread the text over and over again.

‘May your blessings outnumber the shamrocks…’ she stopped. Shamrocks. Wasn’t there a park in town known as the four leaf clover park? She grabbed her stuff and without drawing too much attention to herself she left the library.

When she got to the park she saw that she was not the first person to figure out the clue, but at least she was on the right track There were a dozen people there inconspicuously walking around looking for the next clue. They all had their phones out and someone seemed to be taking pictures of something. She started searching. After a while she stumbled upon a sticker with a QR code on a bench. She looked around to see that no one was watching and then scanned the code. A quote popped up on her phone:

‘Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you’ Nathaniel Hawthorne.

It didn’t make much sense, but maybe she had to find more quotes and add them together? She continued looking. Not long after she found another QR code.

‘We’re too busy watching out for what’s just ahead of us that we don’t take time to enjoy where we are’ Bill Watterson.

She kept looking and found the next quote on a sticker on the entrance gate of the park. It simply said:

‘Put down your phone’.

As if on cue the phone went black. The battery had died. She silently muttered a string of profanities and threw her phone on the ground. A few people looked curiously in her direction. Embarrassed, she picked up the phone and sat down on a bench. The one day she had left her power bank at home, her phone had to die. She couldn’t believe she had been so close to winning $20.000 and losing just because of her stupid phone. It felt stupid but she almost started crying.

As she put the bag next to her on the bench she saw something black fall down on the ground. She reached down and picked up a small, black notebook. Looking around, she tried to figure out who it belonged to but no one seemed to take notice of it. She shrugged, opened the notebook and flipped through it. The book seemed to be a diary. It was half full of entries and to her surprise all of them were written once a year sometime in the beginning of March. In the middle, a few pages were held together by a paperclip. The paperclip seemed to mark the end of the diary. She went back to the last entry written.

March 10th 2019

As tradition dictates, here is my entry. I was unsure where to start but after careful consideration I have decided to start at the beginning. Shocking right? You might have already figured out based on the previous entries that I was the winner of last year’s St. Patrick’s day scavenger hunt. I won a camera. A really good camera. While it was a good prize, I had never really been interested in photography before and didn’t see much use of it. I had my phone after all. But along with the camera came a challenge to ‘capture the moment’. What moment you ask. THE moment. Don’t worry. I didn’t get it either. Not at first at least. I spent weeks photographing everything I could think of trying to figure out what the moment was. As I went around town I noticed through my lens that all people around me had their noses stuck in their phones. I looked up from my camera and I knew what moment I needed to capture. It wasn’t really a photography challenge I realized. Well, it was and wasn’t I guess. I read a quote somewhere that really got to me: ‘Don’t miss out on your life because you’re too busy scrolling through someone else’s’. Don’t be afraid of putting down your phone every once in a while. Who knows, it might even help you win a big stack of money. With that said, I hope you will find your moment as well and next year pay it forward to someone else.

Behind the paper clips and you’ll find the prize. Spend it well.

Carpe diem.

She slowly removed the paperclip on the top of the pages and saw a piece of paper fall out. She bent down, picked it up and stared at it in disbelief. In her hands she was holding a check for $20.000.

She had done it. She had won the scavenger hunt. She looked around and saw what the person in the diary had seen. People, consumed by their phones. Hadn’t she just a minute ago been one of them? If her phone had not died, she never would have thought to pick up the notebook. She looked again and saw what was around the people. A park filled with four leaf clovers and dandelions. It was a beautiful sight. Now she really was crying. She wasn’t sure if it was tears of happiness for winning or for the epiphany the book had given her. Maybe it was both, but she knew that next year it was her turn to host the scavenger hunt and pay whatever she was feeling forward to someone else.